NPR CEO Resigns Over Hidden Video – WSJ.com

Second, though individuals should be held accountable for their own actions, it is parents who wield the most influence of an individual’s destiny.

Third, it is the leftist media who wield the greatest influence on individuals outside of parents, and the leftist media turn people towards irrationality, and this individual was clearly under the influence of irrationality.

Fourth, there is no such thing as ‘Republican rhetoric’ insofar as Republicans promote liberty, because rhetoric is ‘Language that is elaborate, pretentious, insincere, or intellectually vacuous’ (thefreedictionary.com), and any promotion of liberty is not rhetoric. To the contrary, it is leftist rhetoric, at every level of society, that bashes philosophy, religion, metaphysics, and morality, that has burned a hole in the spiritual heart of this country. Therefore, if we are to blame a third party, it is leftist rhetoric that is to blame for the Arizona murders.

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED

There is an instinctive conclusion among the American public that President Obama’s stimulus package has failed to create a sustained recovery. Unemployment has increased, not declined; consumers have retrenched; housing starts have crashed along with mortgage applications; and there is a fear that a double-dip recession may very well be in the pipeline. The public perception, reflected in Pew Research/National Journal polls, is that the measures to combat the Great Recession have mostly helped large banks and financial institutions, and that’s a view common to Republicans (75 percent) and Democrats (73 percent). Only one third of either political leaning thinks government policies have done a great deal or a fair amount for the poor.

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A work of art that deeply impressed me was the film The Lives of Others. It is a highly realistic story about a playwright who lives in Soviet-ruled East Germany; a land in which people get into trouble for saying something that crosses the Communist Party line. The movie depicts how the Stasi (secret police) spied on their own citizens by wiring their homes and eavesdropping on their private conversations twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The protagonist Georg Dreyman is stunned to hear of the suicide of his forlorn friend and colleague who was no longer allowed to write plays because he disobeyed the Communist Party platform in one of them. Dreyman, assuming that he is free from surveillance, decides to pen a play about how the suicide statistics in East Germany are concealed from the public, as they are considered ‘self-murders.’ With the help of his associates, he decides to send the play over to West Germany for review and performance. Special agent Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman. What Wiesler discovers in the process is not only the private details about the ‘lives of others,’ he also discovers the private details about his own conscience. As Wiesler becomes increasingly sympathetic to Dreyman, he takes measures to ensure that Dreyman does not get into trouble with the Stasi for his forbidden course of action.

The features of this work of art that make it so powerful include its accuracy in depicting the way of life for East Germans in a brutally socialistic society. On its merits as a historical film alone, it is impressive. It does not temper its tone regarding the era before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather, this film depicts the era as it really was.

As for the story, it reminds us of just how important freedom is. Many Americans take their rights for granted, calling upon their politicians to establish an increasingly more intrusive government. They think that another law is not going to hurt them, just as a smoker thinks that another cigarette is not going to hurt him. Then, as one right after another is taken from them, they find themselves enslaved by and indebted to a government that is withdrawn from the oversight, authority, and intentions of ‘we, the people.’ This film is a clarion call to those who neither understand nor care about the direction in which this country is headed.

The Lives of Others also gives us a glimpse into the human condition by showing us that even the bad guys—men who are responsible for murdering innocent people, taking away their rights, and tearing families apart—have a soul. Even they are capable of change. When special agent Wiesler violates the privacy of a man who outgrows his role as a meek darling of the Soviet stage, he finds himself making a similar transition. This is poignantly illustrated when Wiener breaks into Dreyman’s apartment neither to find incriminating evidence nor to plant another surveillance device, but to take a book that Dreyman had been reading that is censored by the East German authorities. As Dreyman comes home later that day, puzzled by the book’s absence, Wiener lies frozen on a couch in his own apartment enthralled by its pages.

Perhaps the apogee of the film is found in its conclusion when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the two men connect in a way that brings even the most hardened viewers to the brink of tears. Indeed, it is a film that captures the heart and spirit of every man who knows the value of life, love, and liberty.

On Friday, August 13, 2010, a jury found Pastor Steven L Anderson not guilty of both misdemeanor charges brought against him.

The two charges were “obstructing the highway” and “resisting an order directing, regulating, or controlling a motor vehicle,” and involved an incident on April 14, 2009, when Pastor Anderson refused a warrantless search of his vehicle at an internal border patrol checkpoint at mile marker 78 of eastbound I-8, 75 miles east of Yuma, AZ (55 miles north of the international border). The 1 hour and 15 minute standoff ended with Border Patrol and Arizona DPS officers shattering out the car’s windows, tasering Pastor Anderson for 18 seconds, and maliciously shoving his face into broken glass and roughing him up before taking him to the hospital and then ultimately to jail.

A six person jury from Wellton, AZ, found Pastor Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church not guilty on the count of “obstructing the highway.” When asked why, one of the jurors stated that “they were the ones who stopped [Pastor Anderson] and caused [him] to be in the roadway against [his] will, and they had no right to send [him] to secondary to be searched.”

The jury found Pastor Anderson not guilty of “resisting an order directing, regulating, or controlling a motor vehicle” because the statute states that you must be resisting an order from a peace officer directing your motor vehicle, and border patrol agents are not peace officers. The DPS officers who later arrived on the scene were peace offices, but although DPS Officer Jones testified in court that he twice ordered Pastor Anderson to move his car to secondary, video evidence revealed that in fact he never ordered Pastor Anderson to go to the secondary inspection area. He only ordered him to get out of his car, which is not an order regulating a motor vehicle. Therefore he could not have resisted an order that he never received. In addition, before Officer Jones even spoke with Pastor Anderson, he had already put stop sticks in front of the tires of the car which would have made it impossible for him to send Pastor Anderson to the secondary inspection area.

A few new facts about the incident surfaced in the course of the two day trial as the state’s witnesses were questioned and cross examined. A detective with DPS who is an expert in dog handling and dog training and which had actually had experience with the border patrol K-9, “Jerry C”, that supposedly alerted to “concealed humans or narcotics” in Pastor Anderson’s vehicle, explained that the dog did not actually alert to the Pastor’s vehicle. In his words, the dog “was on the fringe” or on the verge of an alert by dragging its handler toward the vehicle, but that an actual alert would have consisted of the dog sitting down where the supposed contraband was located. The dog never sat down.

Another discrepancy was clarified by the same witness about the length of time that Pastor Anderson was tasered. The first deployment of the taser lasted for 13 seconds, and the second deployment lasted for 5 seconds. It was previously thought that the two deployments were back-to-back, but the state’s witness produced evidence that there was a 3-4 second break between the 13 second deployment and the 5 second deployment. “I sure didn’t feel that break!” said Pastor Anderson. “That just tells me that the 50,000 volt torture session lasted for 22 seconds instead of 18 seconds.”

Another interesting piece of testimony was when DPS Officer Jones and DPS Officer Jeff Mitchell were questioned about the photographs showing large amounts of Pastor Anderson’s blood in the exact shape of his head on the jagged broken glass of what used to be the driver’s side window. Both officers stated that they had no clue as to how or why the Pastor’s head made contact with the jagged edge of the window. According to Pastor Anderson, one of the border patrol agents grabbed his head and purposely shoved it down into the broken glass while he was being tasered in order to “control” his head. The DPS officers stated that they were too far away to see Pastor Anderson being extracted, but that in all their many years of experience which included extracting people through open car doors many times, no one’s head had ever made contact with the broken window sill.

The two “not guilty” verdicts beg the question of why the Pastor was tasered and brutalized since according to Arizona statute, he had not broken any law. Pastor Anderson is suing the DPS and US Border Patrol on five counts: Negligence and/or Gross Negligence, False Arrest and Imprisonment, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, Assault and Battery, and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Deprivation of Constitutional Rights).

As one of the six jurors shook Pastor Anderson’s hand on his way out of the courtroom, the juror told him, “Thanks for standing up for our rights as Americans.”

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